Infosys revamps processes across verticals to boost productivity

BENGALURU | NEW DELHI: Software exporter Infosys has undertaken a large-scale reboot of existing internal systems and processes, including across functions such as finance, travel and human resources, as part of a broader strategy to improve productivity across the company and also save costs, a top company executive said.

The initiative, which is internally being called the “Process Plus Plus Initiative,” was actually conceptualised nearly 12 months ago when the company was revamping policies around the dress code for employees and other employee-friendly measures and has since evolved into a broader revamp exercise across the company’s different verticals and service lines, Infosys operations chief Pravin Rao said.

“While we strive to provide services to our clients in a much better way, we are also looking at similar things for our stakeholders, including internal stakeholders.

Internally we wanted to transform our processes so that we could improve our operational efficiency,” said Rao in an interview on Tuesday. “Fundamentally we wanted to renew systems, processes and policies so that employee experiences could be very good,” he added.

The exercise was rolled out in two phases and traces its roots back to the “Murmuration” initiative that CEO Vishal Sikka put in place shortly after taking charge as part of a strategy to get employees to pro-actively come up with more innovative ideas, Rao said.

As part of this revamp exercise, Infosys even created a separate unit called the Corporate Strategic Initiative, which is being headed by Srividhya VS who leads strategic initiatives inside the company.

“We wanted to bring about at least 2X improvements all across,” said Rao, adding that as part of this exercise the company deployed heavy levels of automation within the company to replace manual, repetitive processes and also worked on simplifying things like travel approvals for employees, which previously required a number of approvals from their managers.

In the second phase, Infosys started revamping processes such as global mobility and procurement orders. Lastly, Infosys tasked each of its verticals and functions to take part in this exercise and revamp existing processes.

Another top company executive, who declined to be identified, elaborated that in functions such as finance, Infosys had undertaken a revamp of all finance teams across the company’s five verticals as part of this broader exercise. Processes around areas such as employee training, maternity leave and travel reimbursement also underwent a reboot.

Rao declined to share exact figures on how much quantifiable improvement this exercise has yielded, but according to internal emails, the 200-plus changes across the organisation in 15 different processes resulted in at least a 10-15% drop in costs.

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